was a Japanese scholar of Arabic and Persian literature and history and the Japanese translator of

Salman Rushdie Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie ( ; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern wor ...

's novel '' The Satanic Verses''. He was murdered in the wake of

fatwa A fatwa (; ; ; ) is a legal ruling on a point of Islamic law (sharia) given by a qualified Islamic jurist ('' faqih'') in response to a question posed by a private individual, judge or government. A jurist issuing fatwas is called a ''mufti'', ...

s issued by Ayatollah

Ruhollah Khomeini Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (17 May 1900 or 24 September 19023 June 1989) was an Iranian revolutionary, politician, political theorist, and religious leader. He was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the main leader of the Iranian ...

of Iran – who, by the time of Igarashi's murder, had died – calling for the death of the book's author and "those involved in its publication." His murder remains unsolved.

Early life and education

Igarashi was born in 1947. He completed his doctoral programme in

Islamic art Islamic art is a part of Islamic culture and encompasses the visual arts produced since the 7th century CE by people who lived within territories inhabited or ruled by Muslims, Muslim populations. Referring to characteristic traditions across ...

at the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

in 1976 and was a research fellow at the Royal Academy of Iran until 1979.

Career

Igarashi was an associate professor of comparative Islamic culture at the

University of Tsukuba is a List of national universities in Japan, national research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Ibaraki, Japan. The university has 28 college clusters and schools with around 16,500 students (as of 2014). The main Tsukuba ca ...

. He translated

Avicenna Ibn Sina ( – 22 June 1037), commonly known in the West as Avicenna ( ), was a preeminent philosopher and physician of the Muslim world, flourishing during the Islamic Golden Age, serving in the courts of various Iranian peoples, Iranian ...

's ''The Canon of Medicine'' and Salman Rushdie's ''The Satanic Verses'' and wrote books on Islam, including ''The Islamic Renaissance'' and ''Medicine and Wisdom of the East''.

Death

In early 1989,

Supreme Leader of Iran The supreme leader of Iran, also referred to as the supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution, but officially called the supreme leadership authority, is the head of state and the highest political and religious authority of Iran (above the Presi ...

issued a

, calling for the death of "the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur'an". In March 1991, Khomeini's successor,

Ali Khamenei Ali Hosseini Khamenei (; born 19 April 1939) is an Iranian cleric and politician who has served as the second supreme leader of Iran since 1989. He previously served as the third President of Iran, president from 1981 to 1989. Khamenei's tenure ...

, issued a further fatwa and multimillion-dollar bounty for the death of "any of those involved in its publication who are aware of its content". In 1990, one year after the issuing of these fatwas, Igarashi and his publisher Gianni Palma held a press conference in Tokyo to announce their translation into Japanese of ''The Satanic Verses''. Shi'a Muslims attended the event in order to protest the publication, and midway through, a Pakistani Muslim rushed onto the stage and attempted to assault Palma. The attacker was arrested and deported. A year and a half later, Igarashi was stabbed repeatedly in the face and arms by an unknown assailant and died. His body was found on 12 July 1991 in his office at the

. In 2006, the

statute of limitations A statute of limitations, known in civil law systems as a prescriptive period, is a law passed by a legislative body to set the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be initiated. ("Time for commencing proceedings") In ...

on the stabbing expired. Kenneth M. Pollack alleged in ''The Persian Puzzle'' that the attack was a covert operation by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Igarashi, Hitoshi 1947 births 1991 deaths 20th-century Japanese translators Deaths by stabbing in Japan English–Japanese translators Fatwas Japanese murder victims People from Niigata (city) People murdered in Japan Salman Rushdie University of Tokyo alumni Unsolved murders in Japan Victims of Islamic terrorism

Early life and education

Career

Death

See also

References